He text Ner the next day at work.

"You're wrong about me" she didn't respond but read it so he text again 5 minutes later "I could tell you what I am but it's not a nice thing which is why I don't usually tell people but if it helps you then I could tell you"

She responded this time "I don't want that"

"It's not just about what you want" he replied, again she left him on 'read'. He spent the whole day at work writing and rewriting what he would say to her and eventually came up with and sent her:

"You once implied I am bi polar and it's not entirely far from the truth but varying moods/emotions isn't the most accurate way to put it, it is more like I have multiple personalities, but even that isn't quite accurate. It's like I have a lot of different ways that I think or different layers that i think at and this changes from day to day or more powerfully from week to week, they're not exactly personalities but they feel like completely different people within my mind. There isn't much of a 'core' me in there, there isn't an overarching Ast who dictates or narrates the whole thing which is my life. The end effect of this is that I often don't feel like things are real, like if something happens it doesn't feel like it happened to me because it happened to what i feel to be a different person inside me, if a thought or choice is made it often feels like i wasnt the one who made it and so i can distance myself from it. As mentioned, I have a big gap in my long term memory so that further compounds this and means i care even less about the consequences of my actions and find it hard to take them seriously because I am likely to not remember accurately what happened in a few years time. Alhough there is a core personality to some degree, he is often overshadowed by the others and while a 'normal' person might distance themselves to some degree to silence the other voices and embolden the 'real' them, I still identify with what the others do so it creates a bit of a disconnect at times when i dont feel like 'I' really did something but i know that technically 'I' did so it lets me kind of approach it from an indifferent angle and while this is often beneficial, it makes me appear cold and soulless so I guess it is fairly accurate to call me cold.

So what I am is someone who doesn't feel real and cant take things as seriously as they should if they want to be a normal human. So yes, a lot of what I do is like 'a game' but it's not like i'm specifically trying to mess with people it's more like i'm just trying to make interesting interactions happen for everyone's sake. I also don't feel like i'm lying when I mess with people's expectations of what i am because i think they are mostly wrong in the first place and there is no real me anyway.

So like when I was first getting to know you I would do/say these weird things more explicitly that subverted your expectations of me so it is more obvious that it's a 'joke' and you seemed to understand this but as I get to know someone, I start to do these mini 'jokes' more subtlely, partly because i have already tried the explicit ones and because it doesn't work when they know you're 'joking' but also largely because i do care and I don't want to mess with them as much. Eventually it gets to a point that they are so subtle and hidden that they cant be seen by the other person but they can be felt and they create a bad feeling. Also as they know me more and im more of aware of the things they know, this means any subversions of their expectations (even if it's in a minor way) of who i am is more fundamental and harder for them to deal with but to be fair you didn't seem to care about the real me anyway.

So yes, I do 'mess' with you sometimes but it is for the benefit of both of us and I do it out of love, I am just a boy who loves love too much and loves to overthink things"

She replied "I didn't ask, but you do make it sound like it's all about you"

What the fuck? of course what I do is about me, I was explaining how I act in my own interests, that doesn't mean I don't do things for others or consider what they want, it's just I have no business talking about those things as the understanding of them is mutually discovered and judged. Is she really this dumb? holy shit, I start telling you things that you couldn't possibly find out on your own and you get upset that I am only talking about things you can't know on your own? what do you want me to do? if I talked about things you could work out on your own then you would get upset that I'm lecturing you and trying to tell you how to think. Women are so fucking disgusting, I swear, three years together and she doesn't even give a shit about who she spent it with.

It's my fault really, I should have listened to myself to stay away from girls forever, younger me figured this out, he was much smarter. Girls have no empathy and don't know what they want, this isn't my opinion, the scientific literature is pretty conclusive that they say they want one thing and truly believe it on a lie detector but actually respond emotionally to the other. She says she doesn't want delusions or drama or a ridiculously unique shared story but she doesn't know, she wants me, she just doesn't know it. The problem with girls though is that they are unreliable and you have to leave some things up to chance, like it's obvious she should and will want me but I cant know if she will work this out on her own. If I leave it to her it will be dependent on what sort of media or music she listens to over the next few weeks. Such a cruel fate, whether she loves me or not depends on some fucking computer algorithm and what it gives her. Love is supposed to be the one escape out of the system, the one escape from being reduced to just a cog in a machine but girls have to ruin it by being so influenceable. It's not their fault I guess, it's what makes them lovely in a way but they're just not worth it, I could try to win her over but even that will be rolling the dice, I may as well just let the dice roll themselves, it will be just as effective.

I don't know why she wont just admit there is someone else, girls never move on unless they have something they think is better to move on to, they don't understand toxic relationships unless there is an alternative right infront of their faces. Whatever, she is disgusting anyway, if she comes around or not is what it is, I have a poem to write anyway and Sarah.

He had just been staring at the wall for the past 20 minutes as his mind raced when she texted again "You never managed to understand what I wanted".

"You don't know what you want, if some guy had such a strange brain to understand what you want and indulge you in pretending he is giving it to you then he must be a pretty shitty person to think along those lines and you wouldn't be happy together"

"Atleast we would be unhappy together, like actually together in a real way. It's my right to be wrong"

"You have no idea, it's fine, you will realise and I will wait for you"

Should I have said that? I'm not actually going to wait for her, I have shit to do and Sarah to pursue. I guess it's true that I will wait in a sense, I will always leave her the option to win me over again, to say the right things and fix things. It's so easy for her to fix things, so little she has to say or do and we can be happy together again.

"Suck a man"

Was that a joke about homosexual oral sex or does she really have such little care for this whole situation that she doesn't even take care in her spelling?

He went to the park after work but just did a quick round trip before leaving, seeing nothing of worth.

When is someone going to leave a feather flag for me? something intentionally interesting for me to find and orient my thoughts around, all I get are generic love issues or interesting things that I have to invent for myself like my bosses phone. The issue is that even if something like that happened there would always be some room for it to be explained away easily as non meaningful, children are a big source of this, they do things with no motive behind them, they might see a feather on the ground and make a flag just because they have nothing better to do. There is a fine line between doing something for complicated unconscious reasons and doing something for complex interesting reasons. I guess that is one of the benefits of our disgusting society, everybody is so busy that they no longer have time to do things for 'no reason', they have a motive behind everything they do. Some people hate the idea of people only doing something for a reason and I guess I do too but really the alternative is even worse, at least if people have motives then what they do is a reflection of them and actually expresses something, if people do something for 'no reason' there is really another reason that they might just not be conscious about and some sort of media that subconsciously influenced them, some memory deep inside them, it just creates too much room for people to manipulate them. I fucking hate when people get mad for someone having a motive behind what they do, everyone has a motive, just say you disagree with their particular motive or what they are trying to do. People can never understand my motives and they fill in the blanks with thinking they must be of malicious intent, people always think that if they cant understand something. People have a natural proclivity to think anything strange must be bad because if it wasn't then they could relate to it. That's where the magic lies, what makes people beautiful, when they have complex but honest motives. The problem is most people think hidden motives are bad so they never self reflect on what their own motives are, I guess I can't blame them to want to feel like they are beyond comprehension, the feeling of not being in control is sometimes relaxing or at least an easy point of blame. I remember just the other day on the couch I was looking up at the ceiling and there was a fly buzzing around but it was flying in a very well defined square shape, for about three revolutions until going back to the regular sporadic flight path, I wonder what the fuck motives created that.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I guess Sarah is interesting, she created an interesting scenario with a random encounter in the park and now an odd daily ritual, maybe it's unintentional though, does that matter? I should really break this ritual, or at least let her choose if she wants it to continue, it has been getting worse, I seem to text her earlier and earlier each day. She will learn wrongfully that I am obsessed with her, I'm not actually obsessed with her, I just like the idea of moving on from Ner and she is just a means to that, never let a girl know you are interested in them, they will react and say they love hearing this but in reality it will make them bored. It's kind of a contradiction though, it seems in real love, whatever that may be, people ignore all the rules and just trust in each other, skip all the games and manipulation, be vulnerable, I don't know, it's a contradiction. It's almost like love is a limited well and when you engage in it with someone you deplete this well, like being in love is the act of doing things that will inevitably make you fall out of love. Perhaps that is what true love is though, when people are willing to deny the reality and perpetually delude themselves that the well is endless to the point that it does become endless in a sense. It's like that mutual contract that people make 'I will pretend to still be in love with you no matter what even if I'm not', and this delusion is what actually creates the true love, it's sort of like religious faith, the act of believing is what makes it manifest.

It cant purely be a choice though or people would always do it, there has to be some objective limiting factor of when people want to indulge in this delusion with someone, it seems to vaguely be around trust but there is something behind that too, like why they choose to trust this one person over others. It's probably purely physical compatibility, that's the only objective metric that can more or less sustain over time, anything psychological or emotional will no doubt change, the only important factor is a physical connection and that person being in a point in their life where they are open to love. I guess there can also be an element that can hold a couple together from some meaningful shared experiences or similar history. Ner just isn't open to love, I thought I could show her how to be but I think she is a lost cause, at least for me, we have spent too much time out of love that it would be a permanent stain even if one day she becomes willing to indulge in mutual delusion with someone. Whatever happens, happens, I guess...

Does she really think I'm that dumb? it's obvious she has someone else, does she really think I cant hear her phone vibrate? I cant tell she gets ten times the messages she used to? I can't see the subtle changes in her face when it's quiet enough for us to both hear it vibrate? that I didn't know she took a naked picture when we were in bed together for him? no, I wasn't asleep, I detect that shit. Why cant she just admit it? things would be so much simpler.

You cant call out these things early or the girl will claim you are worrying about nothing, you cant call them out when they are happening or you get labelled jealous and they think less of you, if you wait and call them out after she is cheating, she will say it was your fault she cheated and "if you really cared you would have sorted it out earlier". Women have a defense for everything and it is supported by the very foundations of society itself. They have made jealously be such an unattractive quality in men to the point that men cant even bring up cheating without sabotaging everything, they get to freely cheat and the man's options are to leave quietly or to put up with it in silence, either way the girl never gets held accountable for her actions.

I guess it's not entirely girls who made society this way, part of it is just how things should be from an evolutionary standpoint, the best males winning at the expense of all the rest. Most of it is created by evolutionary instincts and natural in that sense but often times evolutionary instincts don't even act in the interests of the individuals and people don't realise this, the cheating women don't feel fulfilled, the alpha males who capitalise on it don't even win much in the long run, they win cheating whores who will drop them at a moments notice, they disillusion all the other males who no longer will serve their interests and they just ruin society in general. That is why we have religion, to create a healthier balance between our outdated evolutionary instincts, our hedonistic desires and systems that will actually benefit individuals and society at large in a post scarcity world, a brave new world where people have the free time to desire to be more than a cog in this beast of a species.

If I call it out for what it is though she calls me insecure, I think I'm very secure to let it play out this long, I'm not calling it out now because I'm jealous, I'm calling it out now to let you know that I knew and it contributed to things falling apart, not the other way around. No, you didn't decide to cheat because things were falling apart, that's not how these things work. Things are always 'falling apart' in a sense that they need to be maintained, but the falling apart isn't half as real and dangerous until one side concludes the falling apart is inevitable, at which point the falling apart becomes inevitable. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it is justified, sometimes the falling apart really is inevitable but you of all people should know how much love can distort, to conclude things are irrevocably fucked and not tell me you think this is heartless. It's only done so you can dodge the blame when things do fall apart, 'well he didn't care to try and win me over', right... I'm supposed to care when you are cheating on me, but of course you think I don't see the cheating so I must have no reason to not care about maintaining our relationship other than an innate lack of interest. Women are so disgusting, disgusting in the sense that their choices ruin things for everyone, even themselves. They have never had to think about the consequences of their actions long term, no matter what they do things can turn out somewhat fine for them.

Whatever, I told myself I would always try to make things work with her and i'll stick by that even if she doesn't care to make things work, the only thing to make it work right now is time though, I just have to pray to the algorithm gods that they provide her with the media to realise what is wrong with her.

His mind was a mess for the next few hours, sounding more like an angsty child cursing at the world than the mentally stable middle aged man that he told himself he was. He decided he would stop trying so hard, he understood that this was just the harsh reality for men, to have to be the ones to initiate everything but he was tired, he decided he wouldn't text Sarah despite how much he wanted to, he would never become emotionally dependent on a woman for validation ever again.

Sarah ended up texting him just after 11pm "So you don't want to text me today?"

"Actually it's the opposite, I didn't text you because I wanted to text you so badly and I was afraid of the control you have over me"

"I understand a lot hidden behind what you just said, it's nice, sorry for ruining this with a second text"

"We can pretend it never happened"